Raised 500 million USD in the seed round, aiming to become the "Apple" of the payment blockchain.

Title: 《Analysis: Stripe’s Tempo is building the Apple of payment blockchains》

Written by: Lex Sokolin

Edited and organized by: BitpushNews

Speed is truly impressive!

Stripe’s controversial payment chain — derived from a fork of Ethereum and undergoing key modifications for fintech applications — is now live on the testnet.

It is worth noting that the project has completed a $500 million seed funding round, supported jointly by Stripe and Paradigm, with an initial focus on the payments industry as its first market entry point.

(Source chart: Technical architecture comparison chart)

Interested parties can view the code repository here.

The first thing we notice is that this technology is released under an Apache or MIT open-source license. This is good news.

The Apache 2.0 license is a popular permissive open-source license introduced by the Apache Software Foundation, allowing extensive commercial use, modification, and distribution, provided that copyright notices are retained, license texts are included, and major modifications are indicated. It also includes clear patent rights granted by contributors to users.

Therefore, the open-source community can freely adopt any technological成果 of Tempo. This means that although Ethereum may not realize the commercial advantages Tempo brings to Stripe, it can still absorb its protocol-layer technological innovations.

So what are the key differences? We quote the core design explanation:

Payment channels reserved specifically for TIP‑20 transfers

TIP‑20 is a standard for issuing stablecoins created through specific functionalities. Its core effect is to bundle stablecoin issuance with prioritized transfers on-chain.

In Ethereum, different stablecoin issuers compete with each other, and these issuers are not fundamentally different from other token issuers.

On Tempo, stablecoin issuance contracts are embedded in the TIP‑20 Factory, creating possibilities for future on-chain revenue. Establishing fast channels for such tokens confers permanent advantages. However, anyone can use this factory contract, which means that at the distribution level, competition still exists, but at the manufacturing level, it tends toward centralization.

Low-cost, predictable fees paid with stablecoins

Users can pay Gas fees directly with USD stablecoins at startup. The automated market maker (AMM) will convert these into stablecoins preferred by validators. The target cost for TIP‑20 transfers is less than one-thousandth of a dollar (<$0.001). Liquidity providers in the AMM can earn a 0.3% fee from each exchange. This design also avoids miner extractable value (MEV) and arbitrage attacks on transactions — which have caused users over $1 billion in losses on Ethereum.

Generalizing the way users pay for transactions is a commendable design direction, and Tempo achieves multi-directional payment options.

Here, any asset can be exchanged for stablecoins to pay Gas; whereas on Ethereum, although any asset (including stablecoins) can also be exchanged for ETH to pay Gas, this process is not automated and requires support from smart accounts.

More importantly, there is competition among different AMMs on Ethereum, rather than embedding a specific AMM into the chain mechanism. Such competition is crucial when trying to inspire innovation for new financial primitives; but for Tempo, which aims to industrialize financial primitives, its importance is comparatively lower.

Native smart account integration

Tempo incorporates the high-quality concepts of smart accounts into transactions: (1) supports batch payments for multiple operations (salary payments, settlements, refunds); (2) fee sponsorship mechanisms allowing applications to pay Gas for users; (3) scheduled payment functions supporting periodic and timed payments at the protocol level; (4) uses modern authentication methods like passkeys (e.g., biometric login).

(附图: Statista’s long-term competition trend chart between Microsoft and Apple)

Just as Stripe itself integrates various fintech services into a single platform, Tempo is embedding the most demanded payment functions as native parts of the chain, rather than leaving them to third-party developers vying for user recognition. This is very much in the Apple-style software development philosophy — all experiences are carefully designed, proprietary, and vertically integrated — rather than the Windows-style developer ecosystem that aggregates third-party applications (which may create broad functionality but often lack security and a unified user experience). More broadly, this reflects the fundamental difference between closed architectures and open architecture systems.

Performance and finality

(Source: Ethereum validator distribution chart)

Tempo is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing developers to deploy and interact with smart contracts using the same tools, languages, and frameworks as Ethereum (such as Solidity, Foundry, Hardhat). Its consensus algorithm adopts Simplex BFT consensus (originating from Commonware, which Tempo has invested $25 million into). The validator set is currently permissioned/private, which is expected for the initial stage of a private enterprise.

In contrast, Ethereum features resilience and censorship resistance, meaning anyone can freely join or leave the validator set. Currently, about 1 million active validators are on-chain daily.

Overall, the core impression of Stripe/Tempo is: it is rapidly advancing with a vertically integrated product approach, aiming to dominate the fintech market. Its partnerships with AI companies, Web2 enterprises, and traditional banks fully demonstrate its strength in driving blockchain commercialization.